April 18, 2007 – If your Blackberry isn’t working, you’re not alone. Neither is anybody else’s. In fact, Research in Motion (RIM) is experiencing what may be their largest network outage ever, affecting users of their (overly)popular Blackberry device around the world. Reports from the U.S., Canada, and the UK abound.
In what appears to be an annual event for them, RIM’s Blackberry network is completely down. The last major outage, although not nearly as widescale, was just over 12 months ago, and 22 months ago RIM had a major, widescale outage.
(By contrast, my Sidekick has never suffered a substantial network outage.)
Callers today to Research In Motion’s Blackberry customer service line received only an automated voice recording, advising customers that “Please be advised that we are currently experiencing a service interruption that is causing delays in sending or receiving messages,” (no kidding?) “We apologize for the inconvenience, and will provide updates as soon as they become available.”
The trouble began at about 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, and continues, even though RIM has sent an email to all Blackberry users advising them that their troubles should be over.
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“Most all BlackBerries should be working now,” advised the email. “If your BlackBerry is not, please remove your battery and then place it back into the device allowing the BlackBerry to reboot. The signal should resume and emails should start coming into your BlackBerry. If it does not, your carrier is still having issues and we will send out another email when we are notified from the carrier that the issue is fully resolved.”
Ah yes, blame the carrier. Of course, RIM itself said that it anticipated further system troubles once the system came back up, as the system becomes deluged with a flood of backlogged messages.
June 18, 2005 – Research in Motion (RIM), the folks who bring you the Blackberry handheld and Blackberry network, has suffered a widescale network outage.
In fact, reports news.com, companies who rely on the Blackberry to stay in touch with their employees in the field, and they are legion, have been circulating memos like the following to their Blackberry-enabled workforce:
“Research in Motion (RIM) is currently experiencing a nationwide network outage. This has resulted in the inability to send or recieve email and PIN messages from your BlackBerry handheld. They are working as quick as possible to resolve this issue.””
Of course, if their employees are relying primarily on their Blackberry’s for communication, they aren’t going to get the message until it’s back up. Oh the irony.
Both of the two primary carriers who provide service for the Blackberry in the United States, Cingular and T-Mobile, said that the problem was with Research in Motion’s network. “There was a service interruption at RIM this morning affecting service for many of their North American partner,” said a T-Mobile spokesperson.
This is not the first time that the Blackberry network has fallen down and gone boom. Blackberry users across the United States were treated to an outage leading up to Valentine’s Day, 2003. Ouch.
Still, Aunty supposes that an outage every two years is forgiveable.
Of course, the keyboards going on three Blackberries in a row on Aunty wasn’t, which is why Aunty made the switch to the more reliable, less expensive, and more useful (for Aunty) T-Moble Sidekick.
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I started experiencing the lack of connection around 1600 HST, so I called tmobile tech support and they told me that it was a global outage and that technicians were working on it and hopefully blackberry would be up and running in 2 hours. tmobile credited me 50 minutes for the inconvenience. I kept checking every 5-10 minutes since I needed some files for work!
I called tmob back and they didn’t know what was going on so they offered me $5 credit, but recommended that i call back when it comes back up to properly credit a suitable amount.
so after 7 hours, it came back, and i called tmob back but they were stubborn and only wanted to credit $5 and another 50 minutes, while my opportunity costs were in the thousands! i tried to escalate the issue when finally i got a supervisor who told me to get off the phone and do my work that i’m supposed to do and to see if internet is working! of course it was working! the outage cost me so much time and lack of sleep! she then said what’s the big deal, it was a scheduled maintenance! what the hell?! I’m going to write a letter and try to get more out of them and their misinformation ladk of knowledge and poor customer service. I wish more people would’ve called and complained but most of you were sleeping and we were still up here in hawaii.
Fuck RIM